The Film

Describing an album as "genreless" or "genre-defying" can be a temptation rooted in cowardice — the fear of identifying something as ineffective in its attempt to place itself outside of context — or an ignorant unwillingness to pull on the various threads of influence. At its best, though, to call something "genre-defying" is to give a compliment of the highest order, shifting us away from modes of categorization and into unadulterated appreciation of idiosyncrasy. It is in this sense that The Film is a genre-defying work. The joint album by SUMAC and Moor Mother bucks the pitfalls of those collaborative albums that turn into sonic compromise by digging deep on precisely the elements of this combination that will yield the most uncomfortably honest results.For guitar, bass and drum trio SUMAC, that means a reliance on long-form explorations anchored by the full-frequency spectrum of the electric guitar ("Scene 1"), free improvisation within the context of metal instrumentation and tonality ("Camera"), and a monolithic rhythm section that marks space as much as it does time ("Scene 4"). As with recent full-length The Healer and their collaborative albums with Keiji Haino, the band are ever-willing to abandon the riff in favour of looser, more abstract units of expression.For avant-jazz and hip-hop artist Moor Mother (a.k.a. Camae Ayewa), that means the continued development of a craft grounded in uncompromising historical and sociopolitical analysis ("Scene 1"), the masterful manipulation of vocal effects in service of poetic narratives ("Scene 2: The Run"), and the recontextualization of samples within an explicitly anti-colonial body of work ("Camera"). Her releases as part of free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements demonstrate a longstanding eagerness to use this toolkit to sculpt formal verse out of musical domains marked by improvisation and unorthodox structures.Despite these four musicians' predilection towards abstraction, The Film is at its most impactful when SUMAC and Moor Mother's most obvious musical building blocks are conjoined. On album highlight "Scene 5: Breathing Fire," SUMAC's ability to churn out a vigorous riff brings Moor Mother's contribution much closer to the feel of traditional hip-hop, serving as a rhythmically buoyant pocket for the vocalist's intensive lyrical flow. It's rare for SUMAC's instrumentation to act as the bedrock for anything, even guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner's bloodcurdling screams, so to find them laying the foundation above which Moor Mother's rhymes float is an interesting development.This collision of riff and rap occasionally saves The Film from less than stellar results. On its own, the first half of "Scene 3" is meandering, relying too much on the kind of clean guitar passages where the members of SUMAC's other musical projects have excelled, yet the trio have not been able to find their footing in. However, those earlier passages work perfectly as counterbalance and buildup to Moor Mother's explosive poetry in the track's second half: "Highly unusual characters at our own funeral" and "Whip and Nae Nae ourselves away from our dreams" being among the lines she drops over the pummelling dirge lead to precisely the kind of bewildering payoff that makes The Film so special.It should not go without mention just how harrowing a listen The Film is. For that, we have SUMAC drummer Nick Yacyshyn and Moor Mother's collective synth work in part to thank. An essential component of standout track "Scene 2: The Run" is how it squelches with noisy unease, with the ethereal guest vocals of Candice Hoyes and Sovei (on "Hard Truth" and "Scene 4," respectively) also infusing the album with a sense of cosmic drama that would otherwise only feel implied.Between Aaron Turner's anguished yelps and Moor Mother's exacting social diagnostics, it's difficult to walk away from The Film without having confronted feelings of individual, communal and global anger. Yet, as is the case with other entries in these four musicians' artistic outputs, there are precious vestiges of hope throughout; hard-won outposts of joy, instructions — perhaps prayers — for a better world. Amid its themes of oppression and destruction, The Film flexes its greatest strength on "Scene 4," when Moor Mother proclaims, "Love has been reinstated."